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Programming Your Elizabeth Taylor Mini-Film-Festival

By Adam Sternbergh March 24, 2011 4:41 pmMarch 24, 2011 4:41 pm

Associated PressElizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a scene from the 1966 movie “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Naturally, my recent admission that I have seen only one Elizabeth Taylor film prompted several of my more cultured colleagues to emphatically suggest to me the one film of hers that I absolutely, positively need to watch.

So far, there’s a runaway leader in this impassioned but informal straw poll; as one colleague pleaded to me in an e-mail, “You must must must must must must must see Elizabeth Taylor in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'” (It was the seventh “must” that swayed me.) A strong minority opinion has also been issued on behalf of “Butterfield 8.”

What about you, readers? Any Taylor film you’d suggest as the one everyone should absolutely, positively watch before they die? “A Place in the Sun”? “Giant”? “The Comedians,” based on the great Graham Greene novel of the same name? (That last one kind of intrigues me — Liz! Dick Burton! Sir Alec Guinness! Lillian Gish! Peter Ustinov! And James Earl Jones!)

Of course, this is exactly the wrong time to try to a) put a Liz Taylor film in your queue from Netflix or b) rent a Taylor movie from your local video store, which is either currently being overrun or went out of business years ago. So in the meantime, you (or, at least, I) can greatly expand your appreciation of the breadth and depth of Taylor’s talent by watching this excellent and authoritative video retrospective by The Times’s A.O. Scott.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…